Feminist Studies

Feminist Frequencies: RegeneratingtheWaveMetaphor Nancy A. Hewitt In the fall of 1920, women across the United States, many for the first time, cast ballots in a presidential election. The Nineteenth Amend ment to the US Constitution, ratified that August, provided women with a federal guarantee of enfranchisement. This event brought to a triumphant end what scholars and activists would later label the "First Wave of feminism." On November 2, as women voted either for Republican Warren G. Harding or Democrat James M. Cox, other types of waves were in the air—markers of technological rather than political progress. Radio waves were all the rage in 1920, and Novem ber 2 of that year also marked the first commercial broadcast when Pittsburgh station KDKA announced election returns in the presi dential contest over a 100-watt transmitter.1 Art deco buildings and prints endlessly repeated the trope of radio signals, often imagined as a series of expanding rings radiating out from a modernist micro phone. However, when women's liberationists of the 1960s recognized their historical predecessors by defining themselves as "Second Wave feminists," they were thinking of tides rather than towers, of mari time phenomena rather than Marconi. While participants in the Second—and now Third—Wave chose these identifying terms, the so-called First Wave was defined only in retrospect. Those of us who joined the Second Wave were eager to discover our foremothers and to this extent we had a historical FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 658 Nancy A. Hewitt 659 consciousness. It was not, however, especially deep as we willingly lumped all of our predecessors, the entire sweep of US women's rights activism from the 1840s to 1920, into a single wave. Moreover, despite the fact that many of us took Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Sojourner Truth, and other anarchist, socialist, or African American women as role models, we often accepted—and circulated—a tale of First Wave feminism framed by the seemingly more moderate Seneca Falls-to-suffrage narrative. This narrative opened with the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention of July 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton demanded women's enfranchisement, and ended with rati fication of the Nineteenth Amendment. The story was readily avail able having been constructed by pioneer suffragists such as Stanton and then updated and revised by Eleanor Flexner in her 1959 study Centuryof Struggle.2 Thus, most US feminists of the 1960s and 1970s embraced an image of the First Wave as one, long, powerful surge, pounding the beachhead of patriarchal politics and slowly wearing away its most egregious barrier to equality. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, however, with more than three decades of feminist scholarship at our disposal, this definition of the First Wave seems seriously flawed. Yet it is impos sible to add more waves before 1960 now that the Second is lodged so securely in American imaginations and publications. In fact, the Library of Congress has now adopted First Wave, Second Wave, and Third Wave as topical categories, entrenching them further in aca demic and popular discourse.3 At the same time, new waves are emerging with greater frequency. The Third Wave, which announced its emergence in the United States in the early 1990s, is already being challenged by a Fourth Wave, and the pattern seems set to replicate itself every decade or so.4 Our best strategy then, to deal with past, present, and future iterations of feminism may be to recast the con cept of waves itself in order to recognize the multiple and conflicting elements that comprise particular periods of activism. Radio waves provide a useful model.5 Radio frequencies are based on the size of the wave that carries the signal. Early operators used amateur "ham" radios and, later, other short-distance radio technol ogy known as "Citizens' Band" in recognition of the new technol ogy's potential to enhance the civic knowledge and participation of ordinary women and men. Inventors and operators quickly learned 66o Nancy A. Hewitt that different frequencies or wavelengths defined the particular range across which one could communicate. Higher frequency short waves work better for transmission over long distances, including transat...